How do you know that your email got to the subscriber’s inbox?

There is only one way to know, and that is to send your email to a special address at each of the big ISP’s, and then check the inbox to see if it arrived.

Very few email delivery companies do this. And if they do, they don’t tell you the results, because their delivery rate is so horrible.

Most Email Delivery Companies report the bounce rate.

That is, how many of your subscriber’s emails bounced back as user unknown, or mailbox full. Typically this is around 1%, so then they assume that the delivery rate is 99%. And you know what people say about the word ass-u-me.

Just because an email did not bounce back, does not mean it got delivered into the inbox.

In fact, the industry wide average for delivering subscription email into the subscriber’s inbox is just 80%.

In the second half of 2009, Return Path ran tests that showed, “20% of email is still not making it to the inbox.” Return Path tracked 600,000 email campaigns, into hundreds of ISP’s, and discovered that on average, 1% of their emails bounced back, and 3% were delivered to the spam folder, and 16% just disappeared into thin air. This is according to the Return Path “Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, 2nd Half 2009”.

Return Path has been conducting these tests since 2006, with the same dismal results.

Just because an email did not bounce back, does not mean it got delivered into the inbox.

See 100% of your own emails delivered to the inbox at the major ISP’s, in real time

Every mailing list at mail-list® is monitored with our email addresses, at all of the major ISP’s. Your message goes to our special subscribers just like all of your other subscribers. Then we download your email, and note whether it was in the Inbox or not.

Click on the graphic above to see today’s statistics for one of our mailing lists.